The National Football League with its 30 profitable franchises and contracts with four
different television networks is unquestionably a billion dollar business.

Those of you who sit glued to your big screens every Sunday
afternoon might be surprised to know that in one tiny time capsule from 1928 through 1933,
three small cities in a 40-mile stretch along the Ohio River fielded teams capable of
taking on the Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers and New York Giants on relatively even
terms.

Economic reality at the outset of the Great Depression
ended the big-time dreams of the Ironton Tanks, Portsmouth Spartans and Ashland (Ky.)
Armco.

The story of those towns and their teams is told in Home
and Away about to be released by the Ohio University Press.

The book represents a five-year involvement by the author,
Carl M. Becker, a Miamisburg resident and retired professor of history at Wright State
University.

Becker's study is more than a football story. It is a
social analysis of the three small cities which came to view their teams as agents of
civic progress. The daily newspapers in each town supported their teams almost as
cheerleaders. Some of the game stories of that era would be laughed at today.

The Tanks, never a member of the NFL, defeated both the
Giants and Bears in 1930. As a 9-year-old boy, I stood in the crowd on Center Street in
Ironton listening to a play-by-play (from a telephone) shouted out from a second story
window of a restaurant of those games played in Redland (later Crosley) Field in
Cincinnati.

Portsmouth did play in the NFL four seasons (1930-33) and
had great success. In 1932, they beat Green Bay,19-0, ending the three-year run of the
Packers in their first championship era.

Ashland fielded a company-sponsored team for four seasons.
Among its victims were Jim Thorpe and the Oorang Indians, an NFL member worthy of its own
story, in 1926. The Armcos beat the Canton Bulldogs in 1929 and the Tanks twice that year.

Pro football sprang to life in the aftermath of World War
I. The NFL played its first season in 1920 with the Dayton Triangles a charter member.

Town teams were formed in many cities in Ohio and the
Midwest. They were pros only in the sense that they split the gate when there was anything
to split.

That's how the Tanks came into being, playing four games in
1919 with strictly local talent. The star was T.C. (Shorty) Davies, who had lettered at
Ohio State behind Chic Harley, the first Buckeye All-American.

It was when the three teams started to import college stars
in the late 1920s that they sealed their economic doom. Ashland dropped out after 1929,
the Tanks a year later.

It was Portsmouth that started the trend. Through the early
years, the team was known as the Smoke House, Presidents and the Shoe-Steels, the latter
coached in 1927 by Thorpe.

Although Portsmouth was twice the size of Ironton (at
40,000 the biggest of the three cities) the Tanks dominated the rivalry. It wasn't until
1927 that Portsmouth beat the Tanks.

The next year, business and civic interests subsidized the
Spartans. By 1932, there wasn't a native on the team. Players from St. Marys (then a
California powerhouse), Georgia Tech, Nebraska, Tulane, Texas and Oregon were in the
ranks.

After the 1933 season, when the team went 9-5-1, the
franchise was sold to George Richards, the owner of WJR radio station in Detroit. The
stars of the Spartans became charter members of the Detroit Lions.